Friday, July 03, 2009

Kim Ki-Duk’s Dream (Bi-mong, 2008), which recently screened as part of the 8th New York Asian Film Festival, is a lyrical and melancholy meditation on the theme of doomed love. The film establishes its conceptual premise – Ran (Lee Na-Yeong), a young woman is compelled to act out the dreams of a young man, Jin (Joe Odagiri), whom she has never met – in a simple, straightforward manner. No explanation is sought, and none is provided. It is tacitly accepted in the world of the film that two people can be connected by a dream. The purely stipulative nature of the film’s narrative conceit moves it away from the realm of science fiction – where some technological innovation or disruption of natural law allows for the occurrence fantastic events – and into the domain of the myth or fable – where natural laws are refashioned to suit the emotional and psychological states of the story’s characters.

Early on in the film Jin and Ran are told by a (decidedly non-Freudian) psychiatrist/mystic that they are on opposite ends of a psychic spectrum – Jin’s reoccurring erotic dreams of the ex-lover he pines for, cause Ran to sleepwalk into the arms of the ex-lover she despises – like black and white on the color wheel. She assures them that dreams have the power to change reality, and that if they are able to fall for each other and forget their romantic pasts, all will be well. In its focus on young love as a vital force for change, Dream calls to mind Japanese New Wave films like Nagisa Oshima’sDiary of a Shinjuku Thief (1968) and Yoshishige Yoshida’sEros + Massacre (1969) – both lyrical and richly symbolic representations of lovers in peril.

The main body of the film is devoted to documenting Jin and Ran’s developing relationship – which is mirrored in the film’s mise-en-scene. From the first moments of the film Jin is associated with the color black, while Ran almost exclusively wears white. (In a striking fantasy set piece, where Jin and Ran watch their ex-lover’s fight and make love in an open field, their characteristic colors are reversed.) The film also makes strong use of diegetic framing, using the architecture of domestic spaces to unite and divide the young couple within a single composition. Both Jin and Ran are artists, who work from home, often late into the night – she is a fashion designer, who creates fanciful brightly colored confections quite at odds with her own monochrome wardrobe; he chisels blocks of stone into elaborate seals. As such they seem to be quite isolated from other people and alienated from the flow of day to day life. Once they discover the nature of their connection, they enter into a quasi-domestic situation, wherein they live together and sleep in shifts in hopes that if they avoid sleeping at the same time Ran will cease to act out Jin’s dreams. (Ran’s terror at her loss of autonomy brings the dangerous nature of romantic love into sharp relief.) During a relatively tranquil period in their relationship they visit a Buddhist shrine, where they build a tower of stones. Throughout the film, Buddhist imagery seems to be associated with the balanced and tranquil relationship that Jin and Ran seek and briefly establish.

The idyll comes to an abrupt end, when Jin and Ran fall asleep together, and Jin’s dream leads Ran to commit a violent act. Jin, feeling responsible for Ran’s action and her subsequent punishment vows never to sleep again, and begins to torture himself in hopes of staying awake and atoning for his guilt. This section of the film makes overt use of Christian iconography, which seems to stand for the passion, sacrifice, and suffering that marks the Dionysian flip-side to the Apollonian tranquility Jin and Ran find at the Buddhist Shrine. As Jin and Ran’s passion intensifies, so does their shared pain and mutual self-denial. Eventually they enter into a kind of twilight state where the return to a normal autonomous existence is as impossible as life apart – at this point Dream achieves a level of abject desperation that calls to mind David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988). Ultimately, Dream is a hauntingly beautiful film, and a hauntingly sad one. Relatively restrained in relationship to the rest of Kim’s corpus, it is nonetheless a powerful and unflinching exploration of the physical, spiritual, and psychological cost of all consuming devotion.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Pang Ho-cheung's Exodus(Cheut ai kup gei, 2007), screening as part of the 2009 event's "Hong Kong Film: New Action" sidebar, opens with a single, extended-duration, backward-moving take that director Pang pairs with Mozart's "Adagio and Fugue for Strings in C-minor." The shot begins on a tight close-up of a woman's eyes in a photograph, Queen Elizabeth II's as we soon learn (this opening scene occurs during HK's Commonwealth past), with the camera slowly pulling back to further reveal two men standing in their bathing suits and scuba gear. As the camera continues to mobilize backwards, we shortly see four more men dressed identically as they beat a fully-dressed gentleman lying on the ground. After the camera reaches the ground, Pang cuts to the title credit and then to further framings, also scored with classical music, of lead Simon Yam in highly modern urban interiors. As such, Exodus does not immediately explain the opening shot; Pang will withhold this sequence's narrative justification for a later exchange of dialogue: as in the film's primary subsequent plot line, there is a truth contained within this surreal scenario.

Exodus's principle plot subject soon crystalizes with Yam's interrogation of 'Peeping Tom' Nick Cheung, who claims, before suspiciously recanting, that he was attempting to gain evidence of a female conspiracy to murder all men. Again, Pang opts for overt stylization as he pushes in through a thin rectangular window as Yam's careerist uniformed police officer questions the suspect; Pang and cinematographer Charlie Lam's camera continues to move in and back out, reinforcing the actioner's postmodernist-typed art house aesthetic, along side the film's classical flourishes and its 21st century spaces. The image is spectacularly central to Exodus throughout: a low camera placement of Yam working on burnt chads of evidence through a glass table; another similarly low placement of looming, parallel freeways; and a mobile composition in which Pang reverses the visual field by framing one of his two nascent lovers in a wall-length mirror, all rate among the most indelible visuals of the recent HK cinema. Further compositions blend characters and decor, as for instance a bathroom-set narrative insert that combines the two in a single rouge palette, which provides a distant to echo to Pedro Almodóvar's thriller sub-corpus. Moreover, the film's seemingly less frequent and often more subtle sound manipulations equally impress: an extreme long of a worker ascending an industrial vat in a haz-mat suit includes the faint sound of the aforesaid's breath audible under his or her helmet. The capture of image and sound are indeed foregrounded in Pang's 'artful' genre picture.

Fortunately, Pang's narrative command is virtually equally to the control he maintains over his compositions. Focalized largely through Yam's protagonist - we follow him in his uncertainty, his disappearing skepticism and ultimately in his erotic desire - Exodus nonetheless exceeds the lead's knowledge base on occasion, relieving, in these spots, the audience of any uncertainty that it might still have with respect to the central premise. Without providing spoilers, suffice it to say that the film's penultimate extended, explanatory flashback, centering on one of the picture's two female protagonists, provides much of the picture's darkest humor, combining the improbable with the violent in the manner introduced at the outset. Pang's film is sure to be one of the more entertaining offerings in this year's NYAFF, and is almost certain to be its most visually striking.

It is even more imperative to say as little as possible about Yoshihiro Nakamura's highly entertainingFish Story(Fisshu sutôrî), which seems the prohibitive front-runner for this year's "Audience Award" (following last year's well-deserved winner, Fine, Totally Fine). While I would at this point in the competition slightly favor Pang's offering, if for no other reason than for Exodus's sterling sense of composition in comparison to Fish Story's largely banal DV-imagery, there is no disputing the mainstream Asian pop appeal of Nakamura's latest. In particular this fictional tale of a 1975 Japanese punk record - which we are repeatedly reminded preceded The Sex Pistols breakthrough by one year - that saves the world in 2012, does as much with its coda as any other film this or most years: Fish Story features a Shawshank Redemption (1994)-style closer (and a similiarly easy, story detail-oriented brand of spectatorship) that shows us just how this happens, which the narrative's preceding, jumbled chronology and judicious handling of narrative details manages to keep unclear until the last. Nakamura also manages a substantial quota of humor - the film's ferry-situated Champion of Justice set-piece and its explanatory flashback rife with Karate Kid(1984) references ranks as the unmistakable highlight - that more than justifies the preceding hour and three-quarters.

Exodus screens at the IFC Center, Monday, June 29th at 12:50 PM and Fish Story at 6:15 PM, Thursday, July 2, at the Japan Society.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Yau Nai-hoi'sEye in the Sky (Gun chung, 2007), co-written by Yau and Au Kin-lee, marks the long-time Johnnie To screenwriter's first directorial effort, following credits in many of the maestro's finest (including, among a number of others, A Hero Never Dies, Running Out of Time, The Mission, PTU, Throw Down, and Election1 and 2). Whether Eye in the Sky portends anything new in terms of subject matter - in our estimation, no - or world view - not for us to say - what does become immediately clear in Yau's move to the director's chair is his first-time delirium with the potentialities of the camera and sound track. Eye in the Sky is in other words the prototypical first film of ambition, with a style that one might expect to become more restrained in future - for example, becoming less reliant on punctuating zooms. Nevertheless, these very figures are in this instance well suited to the film's surveillance subject, which ultimately elevates Eye in the Sky over routine first film fare. This is a creditable if not promising feature debut.

Eye in the Sky opens with a largely wordless extended set-up, wherein Yau's surveillance aesthetic is employed to encourage the film's spectators to pay attention to the picture's trio of leads, Simon Yam, Kate Tsui andTony Leung Ka-fai on a Hong Kong city bus. Placed in a position comparable to a viewer of surveillance footage, we do not yet have enough information to avoid incorrect inferences, though Yau will soon divide his principles into Surveillance Unit officers (Yam and Tsui, with the latter auditioning in the film's incipient passage) and criminals (Leung, as well as other Milky Way regulars including Suet Lam as 'Fatman'). In fact, it is Lam's conspicuous presence, always gnawing on something, that provides the SU with their first lead in a jewel heist that likewise opens Eye in the Sky.

Importantly, Lam's predilection for street food corresponds to Eye in the Sky's attention to the sensorium, whether it is these objects' taste and smell, or more to the point, the haptic intimacy generated by Yau's penetrating camera. We as viewers are thus given local color, and as such ritual, to augment the fixed surveillance visuals that otherwise define Eye in the Sky, and therefore to provide a means of locating the perpetrators on the narrative level. The film's surveillance footage, of course, does not presuppose the invulnerability of classical cinema, but instead depend on the visible (the camera and also the SU field agents who perform a similar task) remaining invisible to its' subjects. Eye in the Sky's frequent recourse to telephoto lenses and zooms, while again showing off the tools of the director - as opposed to the screenwriter - manufacture this sense of the viewer trying to hide him or herself from view. (To complete this aesthetic program, Yau produces occasion black & white inserts culled from supposed actual surveillance cameras and utilizes the bars of a televisual image in his optical delimitation of scenes, which he further marks with a cell phone vibration-inflected theme.)Ultimately, Eye in the Sky makes us aware of the apparatus and the act of filmmaking that again in classical cinema is conventionally minimized. In this sense Yau's feature debut is very much a film about the camera and voyeur in space, a fitting subject for a first time maker (and here we said that his subjects have not changed). This is also a film that permits the magic of cinema to work a narrative trio of miracles at the film's end - or, as the NYAFF's program notes stipulate, it is the eponymous master and maker of the universe who is himself responsible. Naturally, Eye in the Sky's title points to the divine metaphor in the process of filmmaking, while finding a narrative cause for its Bazinian perfect "eye of god" visuals - if God could content himself with a single view- which in many cases Yau grounds in surveillance set-ups. This is a film that, for whatever its visual bells and whistles, retains the logical rigor of the screenwriting craft.

Eye in the Sky is scheduled to screen at 3:35pm, Monday, June 22 at the IFC Center in Lower Manhattan.